Metallica’s James Hetfield: ‘I Would Like to Make Some New Music Sooner Than Eight Years’

In their latter years, Metallica have become known for having a wealth of built up material to sift through and lengthy delays between albums as they sort through everything to put together new discs. But if James Hetfield has his way, that won't be how it plays out with the follow-up to the newly-released Hardwired … To Self-Destruct.

That disc arrived eight years after the band's Death Magnetic album, something that Hetfield is not comfortable with. During a chat with Italy's Linea Rock in the interview posted in the player above, the vocalist shared his thoughts on the album rollouts. "I think we plan… At least for now, we've booked out two years [of touring] … at least. So I can't predict the future, but we start there and hopefully there's more than that. And I would like to make some new music sooner than eight years, for sure. [There is] such a pleasure and a joy of hearing your new music and having other people hear it. So we don't wanna wait that long," says the singer.

The delay hasn't appeared to hurt Metallica any as the band recently revealed that Hardwired … To Self-Destruct was on track to debut at No. 1 in 57 countries. The disc yielded the singles "Hardwired," "Moth Into Flame" and "Atlas, Rise!" prior to the release of the album and the band also issued videos for every song on the disc just prior to the street date.

Look for Metallica to ramp up their touring in 2017. See all of their upcoming dates here.